


Time Inconsequential

by Novels



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Canon Compliant, Idiots in Love, Light Angst, M/M, book-verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 10:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20928923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Novels/pseuds/Novels
Summary: My (second) take on what could happen when Oliver goes back to the Villa after twenty years.This is a direct continuation of the novel, starting off right where it ends.





	Time Inconsequential

**Author's Note:**

> I swear this will not evolve into a thirteen-chapter-long story. I think. I hope.
> 
> This is just a bit of fun, to keep my mind busy before _Find Me_ comes out and devours my existence.
> 
> Enjoy!

_ “Come, I’ll take you to San Giacomo before you change your mind,” I finally said. “There is still time before lunch. Remember the way?” “I remember the way.” “You remember the way,” I echoed. He looked at me and smiled. It cheered me. Perhaps because I knew he was taunting me. Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away. “I’m like you,” he said. “I remember everything.”  _ (Andre Aciman, _Call Me By Your Name_)

He remembered everything, he said. What did he mean by that? Was he reminiscing? Was he longing for those stolen hours, a lifetime ago? Did he, too, regret his choices? Or did he make peace with them a long time ago, letting them guide him through his parallel life, as he once called it? I was torn between hope and resignation, the first a luxury I had rarely indulged in these past twenty years, the second a familiar feeling embedded in my thoughts of him. What was he doing here?

I felt his eyes on me as we walked to the old shack and grabbed the bikes. I did not want to know what they were expressing. I did not want to face the result of twenty years apart. I did not want to smear my memories of our time together with stilted, awkward new ones.

I would rather have him forever at 24, lazily stroking my chest after we had made love, smirking at me across the swimming pool, throwing a careless 'later!' as he left to go play poker at the old bar in B., than at 44, a man I barely knew, a family acquaintance, a stranger with a polite smile and glistening eyes that once hung the stars for me and now were staring at my back, and whatever they were expressing I could not interpret instinctively anymore. 

I was lying to myself, and I was painfully aware of it. Oliver was back here with me precisely because I wanted new memories, I wanted him back into my life, I wanted him, any way he would have me. 

But I was afraid, so afraid to turn and find pity in his eyes, pity for a man who could not let the past go. Or perhaps contempt, because he could read through me as easily as he once had and hated what he saw. Or worst of all, derision, for he knew I was still stuck in 1983 and he found that ridiculous. 

Not Oliver. Not him, he would not laugh at this, at me. But pity me he certainly could, and hate me? I wanted to think he couldn't, not after everything we had shared, but so many years had passed, and time had a way of changing people in ways one would never expect.

So I avoided his eyes just as I had during the first weeks of that summer and, as we pedalled down the road that would take us to San Giacomo, I wondered whether he had realised what I was doing, whether it mattered to him.

Are you happy I'm back? 

As if I could ever lie to his face, as if I would ever find it in me to say no. I was, of course I was. It was all I had ever wanted for two decades, Oliver and I back at the villa, back to 1983, back to a moment in our lives when we could be together, when we would be together. Here he was, and I was so glad he had returned to B., but 1983 was well in the past, and so was the moment I could call him mine. My happiness was genuine but it was stained by the bitterness of regret. 

And yet. I was happier than I ought to be, I had told him, and Oliver had agreed. 

I supposed that would be the closest we would get to discussing what we had once, to acknowledging that we could still have it, if only. 

Hope is a treacherous emotion.

It was one of those perfect summer days that can only be experienced deep into the Italian countryside, where the fields glimmer under the sunlight and the streets are empty for miles. Time seems to pass differently in Italy. The country moves forward, has been moving forward for millennia, but it does so slowly, weighed down by its history, its culture, its traditions. It is particularly true about the countryside. We were cycling along the same road we had travelled so many times twenty years ago, and nothing had changed but the attitude with which we rode our bikes. We used to be so carefree. We used to race each other. We used to talk, and laugh, and shout as we pedalled side by side. Now we were cycling well on the right, Oliver following me in a beeline, quietly making our way to San Giacomo.

We left our bikes at a rack near the belfry and we both looked up, towards the top of the tower, towards the clear blue sky. Beyond the tower, you could already glimpse at the sea, but the view was nothing compared to the one we saw when we reached the top of the belfry.

I had been here several times in the past, most often showing the spot to my father's students, but never with Oliver. I had suggested it on the very first day of his stay and he had shrugged off my offer with the first of his trademark 'laters.' 

"To die for," I heard him say, echoing the nickname we had given this place, and I nodded in agreement. 

The view from the top of the belfry was pure blue, of all shades, shining, thick, majestic. The sea reflected the sky, meeting it on the horizon, and it was so calm that you could scarcely tell where one finished and the other began. It was pure beauty, pure freedom, pure tranquillity. 

I turned to look at Oliver and found him staring at me with an intensity that unsettled me. 

"It took us long enough to come here," I told him, looking away, half hoping he would, too. 

"I'm glad we did, in the end." I could still feel his eyes on me.

Trying to hide the effect that his gaze was having on me, I threw myself in the explanation of the history of the tower, of the coastline you could see on the right if you squinted, of the legend of the bells. I avoided his eyes as I gestured and pointed at things, the way Italians tend to, and I let my mouth run free until I had nothing more to say about the place, and I had to swallow everything else that had been on the tip of my tongue for twenty years. 

Perhaps sensing my uneasiness, Oliver nodded at me and repeated "to die for," as if to stress that, indeed, all I had just told him only added to the beauty of this place. He was still staring at me, though.

We made our way back to our bikes and Oliver took the lead as we cycled back to the villa. He seemed confident he remembered the way and I followed him along the narrow streets of San Giacomo and then the main road, once again alone in the middle of the fields. 

I let my eyes and my mind roam as we rode our bikes, looking at the familiar landscape, his broad shoulders and strong back, the landscape again, so I was taken by surprise when he turned to me and gestured that I take a left turn, onto an unpaved road.

I followed him for a few minutes without realising where we were going. When it hit me, the realisation knocked the air out of my lungs. We were practically there, too late now to turn back.

How Oliver could even remember how to get here, I didn't know. I had almost forgotten myself, made myself forget, truly, the memories of this place too sacred to ever come back and risk ruining them. 

He got off his bike and I did the same more reluctantly, letting it fall on the ground as I followed him to the rickety steps that I had never used to get to the water, preferring to walk on the rammed earth, marked by my feet year after year as I grew up. 

The berm looked the same as it did twenty years ago, undisturbed by the events of the world, unviolated by the suffering of a young man. I looked at the water for a long moment, at the grass where Oliver and I had lain side by side, where we had our first kiss, and then our second. Why did he take me here? Did he know how precious this place was to me? Did he understand how painful it was for me to be back here with him? 

"The last time I was here it was with you." I turned to look at him and our eyes met properly for the first time after so many years. His were the same colour as the sky above us, of the sea you could see from the belfry. I knew those eyes better than mine. And like mine, this time, they were full of sorrow. No rueful smile, no polite expression crossed Oliver's face. He didn't try to hide what he was feeling, for once, nor did I. We stood there, on the edge of the earth, naked in all ways but the literal, staring into each other's eyes and mourning a life that never was. 

"I'm sorry." Oliver broke the silence first but held my gaze. "For leaving you."

I nodded. If Oliver was seeking closure, I would give him closure. I had already told him once there was nothing to forget. I could do it again, and again, and again until he understood that I meant it.

But as I opened my mouth to reply, I realised my breath was ragged, and instead of words I let out a sob. 

In a matter of instants, I found myself engulfed in Oliver's arms, held so tightly I could barely breathe as my body shook with sobs I had held in for too long. 

"Shhh, shhh" he muttered into my hair, rocking me as I soaked his shirt with my tears, leaning his cheek against my head. I could feel it was wet, too. 

That, more than anything, made me take back control of my body. I had never seen Oliver cry. I looked at his face, streaked with tears, and I raised a hand to his cheek, wiping them away with my thumbs. His skin was soft against my fingers.

We were so close. I held my breath as we stared at each other for a second more, as I searched into his puffed eyes for something to hold me back, something that would forbid me to take what I yearned for. But I found nothing, nothing but want, and longing, and perhaps a plea. So I closed the distance between us and kissed him, kissed him with all the desperation and love I had buried deep within me for so long I had almost forgotten they were there. I kissed him for all the times I couldn't, I kissed him as if it were the last chance I got. 

And Oliver kissed me back.

And for a while, time truly seemed to stop, somewhere in Italy, on a summer day of 2003.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, folks!


End file.
